The Fancy Dancer

wry little smile with one of his own.
    “The sooner you realize that I’m going to the grave with this kid stuff, the happier you’re going to be.”
    His father was still smiling. But the smile had gone a little wistful, the eyes vacant, as if he were looking out over some expanse of time.
    “Look, kid,” he said. “I’m not going to do the big white middle-class number with you.” He clapped his hands to his head with mock horror and mimicked, “Great jumpin’ jehosaphat, my kid’s a queer, hand me the bread knife so I can commit hairy-keery.”
    His voice went back to normal. “If you want to live that way, that’s your business. But kindly allow me the privilege of having my own point of view. I’ve seen everything in the world in this reservation, the good and the bad and everything in between, and I’ve learned to smile at it, because otherwise
    I’d cry and then I wouldn’t be a good cop. So kindly allow me to smile at you as part of the great human show, kid. The way I smile at everything else, including me and my other kids and my wife.”
    The table was silent.
    “All right, smile away,” said Vidal. “Just don’t laugh.”
    “I never laugh,” said Carl Stump softly. “Not any more.”
    “Vidal,” said his mother, “you look real good. Have you stopped drinking?”
    “Yes, ma’am, and if you check out my eyes, you’ll notice neither of them is black. You can thank him for that.”
    He looked at me.
    Mr. and Mrs. Stump looked at me.
    “You can have me straight and boozed,” said Vidal, “or gay and sober. Take your pick.”
    “Look,” said his father, “I’ve put a few drunks in the tribal jail, so you know the answer to that one.”
    “Are you spending the night?” Mrs. Stump looked at me uneasily, probably wondering if I would consent to sleep on the brown velvet sofa.
    “Not this time,” said Vidal. “But I’ll be coming back to visit. I’m going back to school in a week.”
    Both his parents beamed with genuine pleasure. Maybe Carl Stump didn’t laugh, but he could get off a large grin.
    “Well,” said Carl Stump, “if gay and sober means you finish college, then you can be the biggest queer in the world for all I care. But I don’t know how the schools around here are going to accept your way of doing things.”
    “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Vidal. “Maybe by that time, Montana will have a gay rights law anyway.”
    Carl Stump was looking hard and direct into my eyes.
    “Tell us about yourself, young man,” he said.
    “Tom won’t brag about himself,” Vidal said. “He nearly went to Harvard, but he joined Vista instead. He finished school here in Montana. Now he’s a Bible salesman.”
    Of all the barefaced lies that summer, that one was the most arrogant, and the funniest.
    “Bibles,” said Mrs. Stump wonderingly. “I always wondered who left those Gideon things in hotel rooms.”
    “Well,” said Carl Stump to Vidal, “at least you’re running around with a better class of people than that Joey Fool Hen. Even if he is an Indian.”
    “Joey Fool Hen,” said Vidal, “is the biggest queen south of Calgary.”
    This remark put an end to the conversation for a few minutes, and we emptied the serving dish of the last few steaming tamales.
    Suddenly Carl Stump burst out laughing. He put his fork down on his plate, and laughed and laughed till the tears burst out of his eyes and rolled down his round dark lined cheeks.
    “Carl!” said his wife.
    Carl Stump hauled a handkerchief out of his uniform pocket and wiped his eyes.
    “You know all those Indian jokes about Custer?” he said. “Custer died wearing the latest fashion, he was wearing an Arrow shirt?”
    “Campy Indian humor,” said Vidal.
    “Well, we’ve got a new joke now,” said Carl. “Custer doesn’t get killed after all. He and Rain-in-the-Face give each other a big kiss and ride off into the sunset together.”

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    After supper, Vidal prowled around the house.
    He found things changed, but it didn’t seem to upset him. He wanted to show me the room where he and his brothers and sisters had lived when they were little, but his mother had made it into a sewing room.
    But in the closet, a lot of his old things were carefully piled up, the way parents always keep their children’s old junk. Vidal gleefully fished them up out of the boxes. Schoolbooks, photographs, his Browning High annual. His senior class picture showed a cheerful boy with